"fragile minds can be shaped by the algorithm that powers Google Search."

Another attempt to blame something for the fact that human compute is piss poor on a good day. It's always google or facebook or television or rock'n'roll or magazines promoting waif-like models...

If you examine everything except the problem, don't be surprised when your solutions don't fix it.

So you're saying the problem isn't Google/Facebook whatever enabling an echo chamber of search results but that humans (in general) are too myopic to see that they're being shown only one side of the story?

On a related note, this discussion makes me wonder what kind of customised searches I (and other PDers) see based on our historical internet profiles.

Probably a bunch of Guardian links

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"I was fine until my skin came off. I'm never going to South Attelboro again."

"fragile minds can be shaped by the algorithm that powers Google Search."

Another attempt to blame something for the fact that human compute is piss poor on a good day. It's always google or facebook or television or rock'n'roll or magazines promoting waif-like models...

If you examine everything except the problem, don't be surprised when your solutions don't fix it.

So you're saying the problem isn't Google/Facebook whatever enabling an echo chamber of search results but that humans (in general) are too myopic to see that they're being shown only one side of the story?

Precisely. Human skull meat does not process logical reasoning by design. Out the box it's basically nothing more than a prejudice and bias engine. When you look at how it was developed it's pretty obvious why this is so but most people don't look. They just prejudice and bias their way through life constantly patting themselves on the back for how good they are. Thinking rationally is fucking hard work. It's like trying to change a fuse with a paintbrush, you're using a tool that wasn't designed for that job. However our fragile egos demand that we are the greatest talking monkey that ever walked the earth so most of us are inclined to blame the fusebox and not the dumb bastard waving the brush at it.

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Not actually a meat product.Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCKAwful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart ContagionOctomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairmanwalking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it’s not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn’t matter." -- Max Tegmark

Yeah, where I'm at that's the entire problem in the first place, ahah. That's what makes it so intractable -- you have to use the prejudice and bias to somehow make a person's head-pudding want to be less biased and less prejudiced. And you cannot let them know that's what you're doing in the process!

Note, I don't think that means that trying to approach this particular area is a bad thing. In fact, /because/ it's naturally human to be biased and prejudiced should, ideally, /mean/ a reduction of those things in any form of information gathering process used by a majority of the population! Because critical thinking is hard for humans, all the better that we don't directly engage them with stuff that makes them into fascists, radicals, etc. Sure, some of them will be anyway, but this increases outreach for the fringe and decreases the number of healthy sane human beings in the world, by default.

Pent, this is why reasonable governments regulate industry. That is literally the point of laws and regulations in society. Because monkeys are pretty bad at taking care of ourselves and making rational decisions as individuals, but we tend to do better when we have social supports and constraints that act as a scaffolding to support reason.

Duh.

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“I’m guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk,” Charles Wick said. “It was very complicated.”

Pent, this is why reasonable governments regulate industry. That is literally the point of laws and regulations in society. Because monkeys are pretty bad at taking care of ourselves and making rational decisions as individuals, but we tend to do better when we have social supports and constraints that act as a scaffolding to support reason.

Duh.

Google is a pretty new phenomenon, I'd be inclined to give them the opportunity to fix this newfound problem with their service. It would appear that making the sum of all human knowledge instantly available to all humans isn't as straightforward as it sounds on paper. Turns out there's a weak link in the chain and fixing this requires adjusting all the other links in the chain to compensate.

Coincidentally, this is the reason most software engineers fucking loathe end users.

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Not actually a meat product.Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCKAwful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart ContagionOctomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairmanwalking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it’s not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn’t matter." -- Max Tegmark

Pent, this is why reasonable governments regulate industry. That is literally the point of laws and regulations in society. Because monkeys are pretty bad at taking care of ourselves and making rational decisions as individuals, but we tend to do better when we have social supports and constraints that act as a scaffolding to support reason.

Duh.

Google is a pretty new phenomenon, I'd be inclined to give them the opportunity to fix this newfound problem with their service. It would appear that making the sum of all human knowledge instantly available to all humans isn't as straightforward as it sounds on paper. Turns out there's a weak link in the chain and fixing this requires adjusting all the other links in the chain to compensate.

Coincidentally, this is the reason most software engineers fucking loathe end users.

Step one in getting them to fix a problem that makes them a lot of money is making a stink about it. Otherwise, it's not a problem, it's a feature.

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“I’m guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk,” Charles Wick said. “It was very complicated.”

Pent, this is why reasonable governments regulate industry. That is literally the point of laws and regulations in society. Because monkeys are pretty bad at taking care of ourselves and making rational decisions as individuals, but we tend to do better when we have social supports and constraints that act as a scaffolding to support reason.

Duh.

Google is a pretty new phenomenon, I'd be inclined to give them the opportunity to fix this newfound problem with their service. It would appear that making the sum of all human knowledge instantly available to all humans isn't as straightforward as it sounds on paper. Turns out there's a weak link in the chain and fixing this requires adjusting all the other links in the chain to compensate.

Coincidentally, this is the reason most software engineers fucking loathe end users.

Step one in getting them to fix a problem that makes them a lot of money is making a stink about it. Otherwise, it's not a problem, it's a feature.

This. Google is at the bleeding edge of technology, but they're still a business. And businesses have a blind spot where profit is concerned. There's no function in Google that is designed to foresee forces outside of their models. Market projections are more or less linear. They can graph demand for their algorithms and they can estimate the work required to make their algorithms meet that demand, but their charts probably lack a red line that says "past this point society collapses".

If anyone's basic attitude is "other people's ignorance/stupidity is not my problem", that's fine. Not everyone has to decide that the health of human social structure is their problem (though if it stops working, it becomes everyone's problem unpleasantly quickly). But I decided that I wanted a career that supports that social scaffolding, so it is, in fact, my problem, because I'm five years and six figures of other people's money into making it my problem. When you accept that much funding on the premise that you're gonna do something to help society, you damn well better hold up your end of the bargain.

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“I’m guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk,” Charles Wick said. “It was very complicated.”

As a precedent, in entertainment, food and drugs, we do have federal regulation advisors. It's difficult for me to envision for the Internet tho w.r.t. how those regulations end up serving political agendas operating under the premise that people ought to be informed in a way that serves their ("correct") particular point of view. If Entity made a browser that would filter Internet content according to a rating system, I would only trust using it if I thought it had my actual best interests in mind, as opposed to simply confirming my bias (not the easiest distinction to make). Ironically, the scaffolding might have to use AI to cross-reference the validity (Truth-Value?) of content at a viable pace w.r.t. the rate at which it is generated. Otherwise, tweaking search results to reveal the hall of mirrors would probably infringe upon a person's reasonable expectation of privacy, among other things. I must admit that there is something I prefer about that last option, however it's execution is not as clear as a rating system.

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Hic Salta?________

Constant Eso-Opthamologist of Elicited Stopped-Clock Illusions, brings it back, or sinners just repent______

If anyone's basic attitude is "other people's ignorance/stupidity is not my problem", that's fine. Not everyone has to decide that the health of human social structure is their problem (though if it stops working, it becomes everyone's problem unpleasantly quickly). But I decided that I wanted a career that supports that social scaffolding, so it is, in fact, my problem, because I'm five years and six figures of other people's money into making it my problem. When you accept that much funding on the premise that you're gonna do something to help society, you damn well better hold up your end of the bargain.

Yeah, I wish you every success. Sincerely. Me, I got nothing. Not even the first idea how to fix this clusterfuck of a civilisation. Overall, I think things might actually be improving but we're kinda exposed here, floating about in space next to a gigantic nuclear reactor, at the mercy of any passing asteroid or ideological kamikaze movement, programmed to die regardless of if we do everything right or not.

Maybe that's just selfish justification on my part. I figure I've got another good decade in me at best then splat. From experience I know just how fast a decade blinks past. Maybe the world gets better, maybe it doesn't. Maybe I'll be around to see it. Maybe not. Lot of hysterical freaks always yelling about the end of the world. It's some special needs case in the whitehouse this week. Be something else next. If there's a next.

Me, I'm having as much fun as I can get my hands on, for as long as I have hands to get it with. Too busy enjoying myself to freak out about trivial bullshit like the end of the world. As for google and facebook and all the rest, the cloud has the capacity to be a mental prosthetic, same as any information technology, right back to ink on paper. There was a time when the only book was the bible and only the priests could read it.

Logged

Not actually a meat product.Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCKAwful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart ContagionOctomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairmanwalking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it’s not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn’t matter." -- Max Tegmark

If anyone's basic attitude is "other people's ignorance/stupidity is not my problem", that's fine. Not everyone has to decide that the health of human social structure is their problem (though if it stops working, it becomes everyone's problem unpleasantly quickly). But I decided that I wanted a career that supports that social scaffolding, so it is, in fact, my problem, because I'm five years and six figures of other people's money into making it my problem. When you accept that much funding on the premise that you're gonna do something to help society, you damn well better hold up your end of the bargain.

Yeah, I wish you every success. Sincerely. Me, I got nothing. Not even the first idea how to fix this clusterfuck of a civilisation. Overall, I think things might actually be improving but we're kinda exposed here, floating about in space next to a gigantic nuclear reactor, at the mercy of any passing asteroid or ideological kamikaze movement, programmed to die regardless of if we do everything right or not.

Maybe that's just selfish justification on my part. I figure I've got another good decade in me at best then splat. From experience I know just how fast a decade blinks past. Maybe the world gets better, maybe it doesn't. Maybe I'll be around to see it. Maybe not. Lot of hysterical freaks always yelling about the end of the world. It's some special needs case in the whitehouse this week. Be something else next. If there's a next.

Me, I'm having as much fun as I can get my hands on, for as long as I have hands to get it with. Too busy enjoying myself to freak out about trivial bullshit like the end of the world. As for google and facebook and all the rest, the cloud has the capacity to be a mental prosthetic, same as any information technology, right back to ink on paper. There was a time when the only book was the bible and only the priests could read it.

If this can be condensed to 5 words, it'll win that horror story thread.

Not actually a meat product.Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCKAwful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart ContagionOctomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairmanwalking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it’s not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn’t matter." -- Max Tegmark